I bought a brick of wood chips innoculated with winecap spawn (King Stropharia). I put it in a perforated bucket and covered it with moss that came straight out of our lawn.
Then I forgot about it for more than a week.
Looks what's happened! The fungi seem to like growing into the moss! Is it using the moss as a food source?!? No one has said moss will do that. I would've guessed that moss was a bacterial food.
Is moss the secret to getting beneficial fungi into Pacific Northwest soils?
People around here fight to kill moss in their garden all the time! I wonder if that has contributed to the bad fungi winning.
By summer, our moss is all dead, so I need to harvest it and keep it alive somehow. In fish tanks? Over more inoculated bricks?
I also need to do this again and take a look at the moss under the microscope before, and several times after, over time.
Update later this day:
I searched the Soil Foodweb School's forums to find out if moss was a fungal or bacterial food. There was one thread that sounded promising, and in it was a link to scientific papers. This one suggested that moss is a fungal favorite, but for mycorrhizal fungi.
Update 7/1/2023:
I've been learning from the instructors at Raven's Roots Naturalist School. They've experienced evidence that we need to make our compost with more water than recommended, because that's what our microbes prefer. (Maybe that's why the fungi seemed to love the moss. We have so much of it!) And, compost seems to produce better results if it goes through an anaerobic phase first. It's just what has happened here naturally, historically. Every bioregion is different. Thank you Gabe and Reisha!!
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